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The students’ calm, however, belies the stress that they are under. “Looking around, most everyone looks incredibly productive, seems surrounded by friends, and ultimately appears to be fundamentally happy. This aura of good cheer is contagious,” the editorial board of the Stanford Daily wrote in early April, in an essay that described the Stanford duck syndrome in detail. “Yet this contagious happiness has its dark side: Feeling dejected or unhappy in a place like Stanford causes one to feel abnormal and out-of-place, so we may tend to internalize and brood over this lack of happiness instead of productively addressing the situation.” In late 2010, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that New York wanted to replicate the success of Silicon Valley in the city’s Silicon Alley, and he called for a public competition among universities to build an élite graduate school of engineering and applied sciences on city-owned land. Seven universities submitted proposals for a campus on Roosevelt Island, and Stanford was widely viewed as the early front-runner. Stanford’s proposal contained a cover letter from Hennessy that conveyed his sweeping ambition: “StanfordNYC has the potential to help catapult New York City into a leadership position in technology, to enhance its entrepreneurial endeavors and outcomes, diversify its economic base, enhance its talent pool and help our nation maintain its global lead in science and technology.” Stanford proposed spending an initial two hundred million dollars to build a campus housing two hundred faculty and more than two thousand graduate students. It pledged to raise $1.5 billion for the campus. “I have no idea what gluten is, either, but I’m avoiding it, just to be safe.”BUY THE PRINT » This was not to be a satellite campus. It would be solely an engineering and applied-science school. Hennessy proposed that each department base three-quarters of its faculty in Palo Alto and a quarter on Roosevelt Island. Nor was it to be solely a research facility. (Stanford has one at Peking University, in Beijing.) Faculty members across the country would share videoconference screens, and students in New York would be able to take online classes based in Palo Alto. Stanford’s chief fund-raiser, Martin Shell, who is the vice-president for development, says, “New York City could be the place we could begin to put into place a truly second campus. One hundred years from now, we could be a global university.” Not everyone on Stanford’s campus shared Hennessy’s enthusiasm. Members of the humanities faculty were upset that Stanford proposed to create a second campus without including liberal-arts faculty or students. Casper, the former Stanford president, asked whether the Roosevelt Island project would “reinforce the cliché that we are science and engineering and biology driven and the arts and humanities are stepchildren.” According to Jeffrey Koseff, the director of Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, there were “mixed feelings,” because of fears that resources would be drained from the Palo Alto campus. And there were additional questions: Would Stanford be able to recruit top faculty and students to New York when the technological heart of the country was in Silicon Valley? Could Stanford really reproduce in New York its “secret sauce,” a phrase that university officials use almost mystically to describe whatever it is that makes the school succeed as an entrepreneurial incubator? Exactly what that sauce is provokes much speculation, but an essential ingredient is the attitude on campus that business is a partner to be embraced, not kept at arm’s length. The Stanford benefactor and former board chairman Burton McMurtry says, “When I first came here, the faculty did not look down its nose at industry, like most faculties.” Stanford’s proposal to New York, almost as a refrain, repeatedly referred to the “close ties between the industry and the university.” People may remember Hennessy’s reign most for the expansion of Stanford into Silicon Valley. But his principal academic legacy may be the growth of what’s called “interdisciplinary education.” This is the philosophy now promoted at the various schools at Stanford—engineering, business, medicine, science, design—which encourages students from diverse majors to come together to solve real or abstract problems. The goal is to have them become what are called “T-shaped” students, who have depth in a particular field of study but also breadth across multiple disciplines. Stanford hopes that the students can also develop the social skills to collaborate with people outside their areas of expertise. “Ten years ago, ‘interdisciplinary’ was a code word for something soft,” Jeff Koseff says. “John changed that.” Among the bolder initiatives to create T-students is the Institute of Design at Stanford, or the d.school, which was founded seven years ago and is housed in the school of engineering. Its founder and director is David Kelley, who, with a thick black mustache and black-framed eyeglasses, looks like Groucho Marx, without the cigar. His mission, he says, is to instill “empathy” in his students, to encourage them to see the human side of the challenges posed in class, and to provoke them to be creative. Stanford is not the only university to adopt this approach to learning—M.I.T., among others, does, too. But Kelley’s effort is widely believed to be the most audacious. His classes stress collaboration across disciplines and revolve around projects to advance social progress. The school concentrates on four areas: the developing world; sustainability; health and wellness; and K-12 education. The d.school space is open, with sliding doors and ubiquitous whiteboards and tables too small to accommodate laptops; Kelley doesn’t want students retreating into their in-boxes. There are very few lectures at the school, and students are graded, in part, on their collaborative skills and on evaluations by fellow-students. Sarah Stein Greenberg, who is the managing director of the d.school, was a student and then a fellow. Her 2006 class project was to figure out an inexpensive way for farmers in Burma to extract water from the ground for irrigation. Greenberg and her team of students travelled to Burma, and devised a cheap and efficient treadle pump that looks like a Stairmaster, which the farmer steps on in order to extract water. A local nonprofit partner manufactured and sold twenty thousand pumps, costing thirty-seven dollars each. In his unpretentious, book-filled office, John Hennessy displays items that have been produced, at least in part, by Stanford students to assist developing countries, including a baby warmer for premature babies; the simple device’s cost is one per cent of an incubator’s. In late January, a popular d.school class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability, taught by James M. Patell, a business-school professor, consisted of thirty-seven graduate and three undergraduate students from thirteen departments, including engineering, political science, business, medicine, biology, and education. It was early in the quarter, and Patell offered the students a choice of initial projects. One was to create a monitoring system to help the police locate lost children. Another was to design a bicycle-storage system. David Janka, a teaching fellow, who walked about the class’s vast open space wearing tapered khakis and shoes without socks, invited the students to gather in groups around the white wooden tables to discuss how to address these challenges. Patell and Janka were joined by David Beach, a professor of mechanical engineering; Julian Gorodsky, a practicing therapist and the “team shrink” at the d.school; and Stuart Coulson, a retired venture capitalist who volunteers at the university up to fifty hours per week. “The kinds of project we put in front of our students don’t have right and wrong answers,” Greenberg says. “They have good, better, and really, really better.” Justin Ferrell, who was attending Stanford on a one-year fellowship, on leave from his job as the digital-design director at the Washington Post, said that he was impressed by “the bias toward action” at the d.school. Newspapers have bureaucracy, committees, hierarchies, and few engineers, he said. At the Post,“diversity” was defined by ethnicity and race. At the d.school, diversity is defined by majors—by people who think different. Multidisciplinary courses at Stanford worked for two earlier graduates, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the founders of Instagram. In 2005 and 2007, respectively, Systrom and Krieger were awarded Mayfield fellowships. (Only a dozen upperclassmen are chosen each year.) In an intense nine-month work-study program, fellows immerse themselves in the theoretical study of entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership, and work during the summer in a Valley start-up. Tom Byers, an engineering professor, founded the program in 1996, and says that it aims to impart to fellows this message: “Anything is possible.” Byers has kept in touch with Systrom and Krieger and remembers them as “quiet and quite humble,” by which he means that they were outstanding human beings who could get others to follow them. They were, in short, T-students. The most articulate critic of the way the university functions might be the man who used to run it. Gerhard Casper, who is a senior fellow at Stanford, is full of praise for Hennessy, and the two men clearly like each other. Nonetheless, it wasn’t hard to find a few daggers in a speech that Casper gave in May, 2010, in Jerusalem. The United States has “two types of college education that are in conflict with each other,” he said. One is “the classic liberal-arts model—four years of relative tranquility in which students are free to roam through disciplines, great thoughts, and great works with endless options and not much of a rationale.” The second is more utilitarian: “A college degree is expected to lead to a job, or at least to admission to a graduate or professional school.” The best colleges divide the first two years into introductory courses and the last two into the study of a major, all the while trying to expose students to “a broad range of disciplines and modes of thought.” Students, he declared, are not broadly educated, not sufficiently challenged to “search to know.” Instead, universities ask them to serve “the public, to work directly on solutions in a multidisciplinary way.” The danger, he went on, is “that academic researchers will not only embrace particular solutions but will fight for them in the political arena.” A university should keep to “its most fundamental purpose,” which is “the disinterested pursuit of truth.” Casper said that he worried that universities would be diverted from basic research by the lure of new development monies from “the marketplace,” and that they would shift to “ever greater emphasis on direct usefulness,” which might mean “even less funding of and attention to the arts and humanities.” When I visited Casper in his office on campus this winter, I asked him if his critique applied to Stanford. “I am a little concerned that Stanford, along with its peers, is now justifying its existence mostly in terms of what it can do for humanity and improve the world,” he answered. “I am concerned that a research-intense university will become too result-oriented,” a development that risks politicizing the university. And it also risks draining more resources from liberal arts at a time when “most undergraduates at most universities are there not because they really want to get a broad education but because they want to get the wherewithal for a good job.” John Hennessy is familiar with Casper’s Jerusalem speech. “It applies to everyone—us, too,” he says. Getting into college is very competitive, tuition is very expensive, and, with economic uncertainty, students become preoccupied with majoring in subjects that may lead to jobs. “That’s why so many students are majoring in business,” Hennessy says, and why so few are humanities majors. He shares the concern that too many students are too preoccupied with getting rich. “It’s true broadly, not just here,” he says. Miles Unterreiner, a senior, fretted in the Stanford Daily that students spent too much time networking and strategizing and becoming “slaves to the dictates of a hoped-for future,” and too little time being spontaneous. “Stanford students are superb consequentialists—that is, we tend to measure the goodness of actions by their eventual results,” he wrote. “Bentham and Mill would be proud. We excel at making rational calculations of expected returns to labor and investment, which is probably why so many of us will take the exhortation to occupy Wall Street quite literally after graduation. So before making any decision, we ask one, very simple question: What will I get out of it?” “At most great universities, humanities feel like stepchildren,” Casper told me. Two members of the humanities faculty—David Kennedy and Tobias Wolff, a three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for his short stories—extoll Stanford’s English and history departments but worry that the university has acquired a reputation as a place for people more interested in careers or targeted education than in a lofty “search for truth.” Attempting to address this weakness, Stanford released, in January, a study of its undergraduate education. The report promoted the T-student model embraced by Hennessy. The original Stanford “object” of creating “usefulness in life,” though affirmed, was said to be insufficient. “We want our students not simply to succeed but to flourish; we want them to live not only usefully but also creatively, responsibly, and reflectively.” The report was harsh: The long-term value of an education is to be found not merely in the accumulation of knowledge or skills but in the capacity to forge fresh connections between them, to integrate different elements from one’s education and experience and bring them to bear on new challenges and problems. . . . Yet we were struck by how little attention most departments and programs have given to cultivating this essential capacity. We were also surprised, and somewhat chagrined, to discover how infrequently some of our students exercise it. For all their extraordinary energy and range, many of the students we encountered lead curiously compartmentalized lives, with little integration between the different spheres of their experience. Like any president of a large university, John Hennessy is subject to a relentless schedule of breakfasts, meetings, lunches, speeches, ceremonies, handshakes, dinners, and late-night calls alerting him to an injury or a fatality on campus. His home becomes a public space for meetings and entertaining. He juggles various constituencies—faculty, administrators, students, alumni, trustees, athletics. The routine becomes a daily blur, compelling a president to want to break away and seek a larger vision, something that becomes his stamp, his legacy. For a while, it seemed that StanfordNYC might provide that legacy. Hennessy declared that a New York campus was “a landmark decision.” He invested enormous time and effort to overcome faculty, alumni, trustee, and student unease about diverting campus resources for such a grandiose project. “I was originally a skeptic,” Otis Reid, a senior economics major, says. But Hennessy persuaded him, by arguing that Stanford’s future will be one of expansion, and Reid agreed that New York was a better place to go first than Abu Dhabi. On December 16, 2011, Stanford announced that it was withdrawing its bid. Publicly, the university was vague about the decision, and, in a statement, Hennessy praised “the mayor’s bold vision.” But he was seething. In January, he told me that the city had changed the terms of the proposed deal. After seven universities had submitted their bids, he said, the city suddenly wanted Stanford to agree that the campus would be operational, with a full complement of faculty, sooner than Stanford thought was feasible. The city, according to Debra Zumwalt, Stanford’s general counsel and lead negotiator, added “many millions of dollars in penalties that were not in the original proposal, including penalizing Stanford for failure to obtain approvals on a certain schedule, even if the delays were the fault of the city and not Stanford. . . . I have been a lawyer for over thirty years, and I have never seen negotiations that were handled so poorly by a reputable party.” One demand that particularly infuriated Stanford was a fine of twenty million dollars if the City Council, not Stanford, delayed approval of the project. These demands came from city lawyers, not from the Mayor or from a deputy mayor, Robert Steel, who did not participate in the final round of negotiations with Stanford officials. However, city negotiators were undoubtedly aware that Mayor Bloomberg, in a speech at M.I.T., in November, had said of two of the applicants, “Stanford is desperate to do it. Cornell is desperate to do it. . . . We can go back and try to renegotiate with each” university. Out of the blue, Hennessy says, the city introduced the new demands. To Hennessy, these demands illustrated a shocking difference between the cultures of Silicon Valley and of the city. “I’ve cut billion-dollar deals in the Valley with a handshake,” Hennessy says. “It was a very different approach”—and, he says, the city was acting “not exactly like a partner.” Yet the decision seemed hasty. Why would Hennessy, who had made such an effort to persuade the university community to embrace StanfordNYC, not pause to call a business-friendly mayor to try to get the city to roll back what he saw as its new demands? Hennessy says that his sense of trust was fundamentally shaken. City officials say they were surprised by the sudden pullout, especially since Hennessy had an agreeable conversation with Deputy Mayor Steel earlier that same week. Steel insists that “the goalposts were fixed.” All the stipulations that Stanford now complains about, he says, were part of the city’s original package. Actually, they weren’t. In the city’s proposal request, the due dates and penalties were left blank. Seth Pinsky, the president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, who was one of the city’s lead negotiators, says that these were to be filled in by each bidder and then discussed in negotiations. “The more aggressive they were on the schedule and the more aggressive they were on the amount, the more favorably” the city looked at the bid, Pinsky told me. In the negotiations, he said, he tried to get each bidder to boost its offer by alerting it of more favorable competing bids. At one point, Stanford asked about an ambiguous clause in the city’s proposal request: would the university have to indemnify the city if it were sued for, say, polluted water on Roosevelt Island? The city responded that the university would. According to Pinsky, city lawyers said that this was “not likely to produce significant problems,” and that other bidders did not object. To Pinsky and the city, these demands—and the twenty-million-dollar penalty if the City Council’s approval was delayed—were “not uncommon,” since developers often “take liability for public approvals.” To Stanford, the stipulations made it seem as if the goal posts were not fixed. Three days after Stanford withdrew, the city awarded the contract to Cornell University and its junior partner, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, the oldest university in Israel. Not a few Hennessy and Stanford partisans were pleased. “I am very relieved,” Gerhard Casper said. Jeff Koseff, who played golf with Hennessy within a few days of Stanford’s withdrawal, recalls, “He was already talking about what we could do next.” One venture that Hennessy was exploring, though there is as yet no concrete plan, is working with the City College of New York to establish a Stanford beachhead in Manhattan. Deputy Mayor Steel says, “I’d be ecstatic.” Still, a Stanford official is dubious: “John’s disillusionment with the city is pretty thorough.” Another person who is pleased with the withdrawal is Marc Andreessen, whose wife teaches philanthropy at Stanford and whose father-in-law, John Arrillaga, is one of the university’s foremost donors. Instead of erecting buildings, Andreessen says, Stanford should invest even more of its resources in distance learning: “We’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver a state-of-the-art, Stanford-calibre education to every single kid around the world. And the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting our potential.” Hennessy, like Andreessen, believes that online learning can be as revolutionary to education as digital downloads were to the music business. Distance learning threatens one day to disrupt higher education by reducing the cost of college and by offering the convenience of a stay-at-home, do-it-on-your-own-time education. “Part of our challenge is that right now we have more questions than we have answers,” Hennessy says, of online education. “We know this is going to be important and, in the long term, transformative to education. We don’t really understand how yet.” This past fall, Stanford introduced three free online engineering lectures, each organized into short segments. A hundred and sixty thousand students in a hundred and ninety countries signed up for Sebastian Thrun’s online Introduction to Artificial Intelligence class. They listened to the same material that Stanford students did and were given pass/fail grades; at the end, they received certificates of completion, which had Thrun’s name on them but not Stanford’s. The interest “surprised us,” John Etchemendy, the provost, says, noting that Stanford was about to introduce several more classes, which would also be free. The “key question,” he says, is: “How can we increase efficiency without decreasing quality?” Stanford faculty members, accustomed to the entrepreneurial culture, have already begun to clamor for a piece of the potential revenue whenever the university starts to charge for the classes. This quest offends faculty members like Debra Satz, the senior associate dean, who regards herself as a public servant. “Some of the faculty see themselves as private contractors, and, if you are, you expect to get paid extra,” she says. “But, if you’re a member of a community, then you have certain responsibilities.” Sebastian Thrun quit his faculty position at Stanford; he now works full time at Udacity, a start-up he co-founded that offers online courses. Udacity joins a host of companies whose distance-learning investments might one day siphon students from Stanford—Apple, the News Corp’s Worldwide Learning, the Washington Post’s Kaplan University, the New York Times’ Knowledge Network, and the nonprofit Khan Academy, with its approximately three thousand free lectures and tutorials made available on YouTube and funded by donations from, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, and Ann and John Doerr. Since so much of an undergraduate education consists of living on campus and interacting with other students, for those who can afford it—or who benefit from the generous scholarships offered by such institutions as Stanford—it’s difficult to imagine that an online education is comparable. Nor can an online education duplicate the collaborative, multidisciplinary classes at Stanford’s d.school, or the personal contact with professors that graduate students have as they inch toward a Ph.D. John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed that traditional companies and services get disrupted because they are inefficient and costly. The publishing industry has suffered in recent years, the argument goes, because reading on screens is more convenient. Why wait in line at a store when there’s Amazon? Why pay for a travel agent when there’s Expedia? The same argument can be applied to online education. An online syllabus could reach many more students, and reduce tuition charges and eliminate room and board. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class. But online education might also disrupt everything that distinguishes Stanford. Could a student on a video prompter have coffee with a venture capitalist? Could one become a T-student through Web chat? Stanford has been aligned with Silicon Valley and its culture of disruption. Now Hennessy and Stanford have to seriously contemplate whether more efficiency is synonymous with a better education. In mid-February, Hennessy embarked on a sabbatical that will take him away from campus through much of the spring. His plans included travelling and spending time with his family. The respite, Hennessy says, will provide an opportunity to think. Of all the things he plans to think hard about, he says, distance learning tops the list. Stanford, like newspapers and music companies and much of traditional media a little more than a decade ago, is sailing in seemingly placid waters. But Hennessy’s digital experience alerts him to danger. He says, “There’s a tsunami coming.” ♦